Channel characterization for indoor communication systems employing reconfigurable antennas

Recent technologies can allow reconfigurable antennas to change its operating frequency/bandwidth, and radiation pattern characteristics including: pointing directions, beam-width and polarization. In this paper, we investigate the impact of reconfigurable antenna radiation patterns on characteristics of radio channel for indoor wireless communication systems. In particular, we consider a dipole reconfigurable antenna that can change its radiation pattern and its characteristics by varying its length. We conduct simulations based on multi-ray, multi-dimensional, multi-antenna state RF model. We finally show the benefit of using these reconfigurable antennas by studying the bit-error-rate (BER) performance of a coded communication system. Our results show that by adaptively selecting the best antenna radiation pattern that minimizes the BER for each codeword, we can achieve a significant performance gain compared to the case where only fixed antenna radiation pattern is employed.